Announcing the Cover Art Archive

In a server update last April we quietly said that “we’ve also improved cover art support slightly.” What we actually did was release the first version of the Cover Art Archive, a cooperation between MusicBrainz and the Internet Archive. First, a little background:

Cover art (the images associated with music products) adds a great amount of value to the digital music experience. Many projects and apps on the net use these images to add color and depth to their music tools. However, there isn’t a cleanly organized, publicly available resource where everyone can access these images. You can use Amazon product images, but your project needs to be able to abide by their Terms of Service, which doesn’t work for everyone. Many projects use Google Images to source their cover art, but that is an inexact science since they may not always find the right image.

The Cover Art Archive aims to solve these problems by making these images available to the public. But since we are not lawyers, we can not say what can and can not be done with these. So use them at your own risk! That said, everyone on the internet is using these images anyway and the common understanding is that if you’re selling music you’re pretty safe. We suggest that when you try to figure out what to do, make sure that you respect the artists and their labels and make the music world a better place.

All images in the Cover Art Archive are indexed by the release’s MBID, and all metadata can be parsed by a JSON document. For instance, to fetch the front cover for any given release, construct this URL:

http://coverartarchive.org/release/76df3287-6cda-33eb-8e9a-044b5e15ffdd/front

Once you GET this resource, you will be redirected to the proper Internet Archive URL that yields either an image file or a 404 error if we do not have this image. For lots more details on how to use the Cover Art Archive, please take a look at our API documentation. So far, there are Java, C and Perl bindings to the API.

For some stunning examples of what people have already done with the Cover Art Archive, please take a look at these links:

So far, we’ve collected nearly 100,000 images that are attached to 54,000 releases for a 5% coverage in MusicBrainz. The largest file we have clocks in at 23MB and the largest image is 16,000 x 7842 (125 megapixels!). For all of the juicy stats on this project, check out our cover art statistics page.

We’ve just gotten started and we need your help! Won’t you please consider uploading some images to this archive? To get started, log in with your MusicBrainz account (or create a new one) find your favorite release and then click on the cover art tab to view the existing pieces of art and/or upload new ones. For more details, see our How to add cover art guide.

Thank you to everyone who has worked hard to make this project a reality! And thank you to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive for fostering this project!

Server update, 2012-10-01

We’ve just finished pushing out an update today, which will be the last update before the schema change, which is now due in 2 weeks. Sadly, this release doesn’t feature the much anticipated relationship editor, which had to be reverted at the last minute as we still think it could do with more user testing. Hopefully it will make the next release!

This release features work from Aurélien Mino, Nicolás Tamargo, nikki, patate12, Pavan Chander, Ulrich Klauer and the MusicBrainz developers. Thanks for your work everyone!

Bug

  • [MBS-3825] – Release Editor is not displaying the release title on the tracklist tab
  • [MBS-3866] – Disambiguation comments can be the same
  • [MBS-3902] – Database allows artist type group with a gender set
  • [MBS-4614] – Country dropdown is sorted by English name
  • [MBS-4670] – "Relate to…" maybe should not add #relate_to hash to address bar URL
  • [MBS-4861] – Data loss: Changing release artist revert track numbers
  • [MBS-5019] – Release group with no name created
  • [MBS-5089] – Statistics: "unique" number of ISWCs is higher than "all" number of ISWCs
  • [MBS-5111] – Editor statistics data regularly falls out of cache, and cannot be recomputed
  • [MBS-5199] – Recording disambiguation comment is not removed when it should in RE’s recordings tab
  • [MBS-5240] – Adding an IPI code to an artist with IPI pending fails
  • [MBS-5241] – Add Medium/Add Release do not show up in recording edit histories
  • [MBS-5242] – Add Medium edits don’t always link recordings, even those that exist
  • [MBS-5250] – Non-specific dates create negative ages
  • [MBS-5264] – Track Parser results in edits changing durations on tracks in mediums with discids in some cases
  • [MBS-5295] – Webservice should distinguish between "" and NULL as a value for release->barcode.
  • [MBS-5298] – WikiDocs links are not scheme-independent
  • [MBS-5301] – gravatars do not get loaded over SSL when they should be
  • [MBS-5315] – ISE moving a discid
  • [MBS-5319] – QUnit testrunner is not compatible with current phantomjs versions.
  • [MBS-5335] – $entity is undefined in WebServiceStash.pm

Improvement

  • [MBS-1579] – Add Release editor: option to swap track title <> artist
  • [MBS-4066] – Simple RE parser speed boost
  • [MBS-4539] – Add h1 to release editor
  • [MBS-4831] – Exclude releases with pending art edits from the CAA report
  • [MBS-5152] – Allow removing a disc ID from the disc ID page
  • [MBS-5281] – Display relationships on release-group overview page
  • [MBS-5282] – language switcher should appear when number of languages > 1, not > 0
  • [MBS-5337] – Add more classes to entity pages and when displaying edits

Task

  • [MBS-2404] – Private mb dump files to be encrypted
  • [MBS-5169] – Add "Rock in China" to the "Other Databases" whitelist

The Git commit SHA for this release is ce2da4b67e39821348cd849ca1957b8e15c33f52, tag is v-2012-10-01.

Help us make some stickers!

MusicBrainz will be attending the Google Summer of Code mentor summit, and we’d love to have some stickers to hand out, so our fellow open-source friends can show off how cool we are. Sadly, we don’t have the skills to actually make the designs to send off to get printed… but that’s where you come in!

Do you do graphic design? Do you know someone who would be willing to help us? If so, please get in touch with us – leave a comment, tweet us or shoot an email to info@musicbrainz.org. Thanks!

Splunk supports MusicBrainz!

As part of Google’s Summer of Code program we accepted Dániel Bali to work on analyzing our web server logs to mine them for interesting information about MusicBrainz and people who are using MusicBrainz. (see a preview of this project)

To make that project a reality we had help from Splunk, the company that creates the fantastic data analysis tool by the same name. Splunk provided us with enterprise trial licenses during the summer and now going forward has accepted us into their Splunk for Good program. This program provides a free 10GB/day (it allows us to import 10GB of data into our Splunk server per day) license on a yearly basis.

We now count Splunk among our sponsors and we’re looking forward to rolling out Dániel’s work in October. Thank you Splunk and thank you to Joyce Morrell and Christy Wilson from Splunk for working with us to make this happen!

Search server release: 2012-09-18

We’ve just updated our search servers with a new release. This release adds support for a new improved json format for the search server and will be publicly available after the next mbserver release. We also now output the date (in the XML/json) the index was last updated so you know how old the results received are. This will be exposed to the end-user in the web search results in an upcoming release of musicbrainz-server.

Thanks to Paul Taylor and Aurélien Mino for making this release happen!

Improvement

  • [SEARCH-232] – Search server should return information about when the indexes were last updated

New Feature

  • [SEARCH-226] – Add Support for Json format as described in http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:kuno/Web_Service/JSON
  • [SEARCH-227] – Add prettyprint option for Json (and XML)

Possible date change for our summit: 9-11 November 2012

I’ve just found out that the Music Hack Day London conflicts with our summit in Barcelona. 🙁 Given that a few people from MusicBrainz wanted to attend that Hack Day, we’re considering the possibility of changing our summit date to 9-11 November.

I’ve already contacted all of the people who signed up as potential attendees, but I wanted to throw this suggestion out to all of you who might consider going.

If you have a problem with the new date, please post a comment. If we dont get any significant conflicts, we may change the date.

Thanks!

Server update, 2012-09-17

We’ve just finishing pushing out another update to the MusicBrainz servers. This release is mostly a bug fix release, with a few improvements thrown in for good measure. Thanks to Alastair Porter, Aurélien Mino, Nicolás Tamargo, nikki, and the MusicBrainz developers for their hard work on this release! Here’s what has changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-3540] – Set track length edits can become too wide
  • [MBS-3757] – ‘releasegroup’ used as the annotation type when displaying search results
  • [MBS-3956] – Merging URLs can be done as auto-edit
  • [MBS-4085] – Users with open edits can delete their account
  • [MBS-4143] – Removing a tag from a well-tagged entity can give "undefined" as text
  • [MBS-4365] – "Edit Recording Associations" displays track artists for recordings
  • [MBS-4584] – Track parser doesn’t understand fullwidth full stops
  • [MBS-4599] – Artist not shown next to release name in edit release label edits
  • [MBS-4872] – Can’t directly add a release to a collection if no collections exist
  • [MBS-4946] – Deleting account does not unset new profile fields
  • [MBS-4950] – Internal server error when cancelling a recording merge instead of submitting
  • [MBS-5010] – Running a slave database without READONLY database settings produces confusing exceptions
  • [MBS-5029] – Cover art from downvoted ASIN still being displayed in the sidebar
  • [MBS-5043] – Edit search forgets "low" data quality selection
  • [MBS-5066] – IPI fields are not validated properly
  • [MBS-5086] – Degrade release editor gracefully if release editor session memcached is not available.
  • [MBS-5120] – Edits changing an empty cat number to a non-empty one can overwrite each other
  • [MBS-5143] – Non-translatable items on "http://musicbrainz.org/relationships"
  • [MBS-5164] – Non-translatable items on "http://musicbrainz.org/artist/<MBID>/edit_annotation"
  • [MBS-5194] – Set primary alias for locale is auto-edit
  • [MBS-5204] – & in an image comment shows up as &amp; in edits
  • [MBS-5205] – Text diff incorrectly highlights first word that didn’t change
  • [MBS-5209] – statistics/editors largely untranslatable
  • [MBS-5210] – statistics/timeline shows the menu and page footer in English
  • [MBS-5211] – (Part of) page title untranslatable for statistics/*
  • [MBS-5212] – search/edits is largely untranslatable
  • [MBS-5217] – Internal server error loading a report when reports have never been generated
  • [MBS-5224] – Historic edits are shown incorrectly when the server is translated
  • [MBS-5235] – Edit search is not correctly ordered when edits have the same open time
  • [MBS-5239] – Dropdowns on "Add/Edit Relationship" pages are untranslatable
  • [MBS-5248] – Subscriptions mails should not have In-Reply-To and References headers
  • [MBS-5252] – data dump MD5SUMS file includes temporary paths and private dump
  • [MBS-5255] – Replication trigger for release_group_secondary_type_join is misnamed and duplicates trigger for release_group_secondary_type
  • [MBS-5257] – Split artist is stuck and doesn’t get removed
  • [MBS-5258] – DropReplicationTriggers.sql not in sync with CreateReplicationTriggers.sql
  • [MBS-5259] – Track Parser "detect track durations" is broken on releases with DiscIDs, appending lengths to Artist
  • [MBS-5270] – scripts complain about LWP not being loaded
  • [MBS-5271] – gravatar hash should be made of lower cased smtp address

Improvement

  • [MBS-169] – Show number of subscriptions on subscriptions page
  • [MBS-3360] – Remove unused tags and garbage collect tags on retagging
  • [MBS-3878] – Number of votes to fail normal and low quality data should be the same
  • [MBS-4465] – Cover Art Archive > Ability to navigate through zoomed cover arts
  • [MBS-4638] – Show more information on the reorder cover art page
  • [MBS-4779] – http://musicbrainz.org/iswc/ISWC url should accept various ISWC formatting
  • [MBS-5251] – URL statistics
  • [MBS-5263] – Cover art from sidebar should not be included in the set of images when you’re navigating through zoomed cover arts
  • [MBS-5267] – Make fallback to language detection via browser headers optional
  • [MBS-5273] – Normalise mobile Wikipedia URLs

New Feature

  • [MBS-4825] – Normalize blogspot URLs

Task

  • [MBS-5008] – Remove voting differences for data quality
  • [MBS-5249] – Update replication triggers verbosity for the search server updater module

Sub-task

  • [MBS-3135] – Predefined edit URL should be redirect/converted to standard edit searches

The Git commit SHA for this release is 8060824492, git tag v-2012-09-17.